Science in a Free Society

Paul Feyerabend

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780860917533
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788731928
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

No study in the philosophy of science created such controversy in the seventies as Paul Feyerabend's Against Method. In this work, Feyerabend reviews that controversy, and extends his critique beyond the problem of scientific rules and methods, to the social function and direction of science today.

In the first part of the book, he launches a sustained and irreverent attack on the prestige of science in the West. The lofty authority of the "expert" claimed by scientists is, he argues, incompatible with any genuine democracy, and often merely serves to conceal entrenched prejudices and divided opinions with the scientific community itself. Feyerabend insists that these can and should be subjected to the arbitration of the lay population, whose closest interests they constantly affect-as struggles over atomic energy programs so powerfully attest.

Calling for far greater diversity in the content of education to facilitate democratic decisions over such issues, Feyerabend recounts the origin and development of his own ideas-successively engaged by Brecht, Ehrenhaft, Popper, Mill and Lakatos-in a spirited intellectual self-portrait.

Science in a Free Society is a striking intervention into one of the most topical debates in contemporary culture and politics.

Part One

Reason and Practice

1.Against Method Revisited

Against Method grew out of lectures I gave at the London School of Economics and University College London. Imre Lakatos attended most of them. His office window at the London School of Economics was directly opposite the window of the lecture hall. He would listen to what I was saying and storm into the lecture hall to raise objections. My aim in the lectures was to show that some very simple and plausible rules and standards which both philosophers and scientists regarded as essential parts of rationality were violated in the course of episodes (Copernican Revolution; triumph of the kinetic theory; rise of quantum theory; and so on) they regarded as equally essential. More specifically, I tried to show (a) that the rules (standards) were actually violated and that the more perceptive scientists were aware of the violations; and (b) that they had to be violated. Insistence on the rules would not have improved matters, it would have arrested progress.

An argument of this kind makes a variety of assumptions, some of them rather complex. To start with I assume that my readers agree about progress and good science and that they do so independently of whatever rules or standards they adopt. For example I assume that they applaud the gradual acceptance of the idea of the motion of the earth or of the atomic constitution of matter in the late 19th and early 20th centuries independently of what rules and standards they think it obeys. The argument addresses people who hold such beliefs and it tries to convince them that they cannot have both the developments they cherish and the rules and standards they want to defend.

Branch (b) of the argument makes some rather far-reaching assumptions not only about what did happen, but about what could and what could not have happened given the material, intellectual, scientific conditions of a particular time. For example when describing the way in which Galileo separated theory and experience I also point out (AM, p. 152) that new correspondence rules not only were not introduced but could not be introduced because it takes time to develop instruments and ways of testing not based on everyday experience. Today Aristotle, tomorrow Helmholtz – that is not only unlikely, it is impossible. Considerations such as these change from one case to the next and so each case must be discussed on its own merits.

In AM I discussed two cases in order to create difficulties for Newtonian inductivism, falsificationism and the theory of research programmes. I also tried to show that theories cannot always be compared by content and/or versimilitude, even when they are theories ‘in the same domain’. I conjectured that similar difficulties would arise with any rule and any standard not yet completely voided of content. And as rules and standards are usually taken to constitute ‘rationality’ I inferred that famous episodes in science that are admired by scientists, philosophers and the common folk alike were not ‘rational’, they did not occur in a ‘rational’ manner, ‘reason’ was not the moving force behind them, and they were not judged ‘rationally’.

The main objection against such an argument is the poverty of its basis: one or two examples – and rationality is supposed to be done in.¹ Besides, some critics pointed out, the fact that a rule is violated in one case does not make it useless in others, or in the long run. For example, a theory may be in conflict with facts or ad hoc and may still be retained – but eventually the conflict will have to be resolved and the ad hoc adaptations will have to be removed.

The reply to the last remark is obvious: changing non adhocness and falsification by facts into non adhocness and falsification in the long run means replacing one standard by another and so admitting that the original standard was not adequate. The reply to the first objection is, however, this. It is true that two cases do not all rules remove but as far as I can see they remove basic rules that form an essential part of the rationalists’ prayer book. Only some of these basic rules have been discussed in connection with the case studies but the reader can easily apply the assembled material to Bayesean procedures, conventionalism (whether Poincaré or Dingler) and ‘conditional rationalism’ where rules and standards are asserted to hold under certain well-specified conditions only. He can even remove the demand that scientific research must conform to the laws of logic.² Apart from those natural extensions the matter now rests with the rationalist. It is he who suggests that Great Science conforms to Great Standards. What great and non-empty standards are to take the place of the standards discussed?

The difficulty of the task is shown very clearly by the fate of the theory of research programmes. Lakatos realized and admitted that the existing standards of rationality, standards of logic included, are too restrictive and would have hindered science had they been applied with determination. He therefore permitted the scientist to violate them (he admits that science is not ‘rational’ in the sense of these standards). However, he demanded that research programmes show certain features in the long run – they must be progressive. In Chapter 16 of AM (and in my essay ‘On the Critique of Scientific Reason’³) I have argued that this demand no longer restricts scientific practice. Any development agrees with it. The demand (standard) is rational, but it is also empty. Rationalism and the demands of reason have become purely verbal in the theory of Lakatos.

It should be noted that I not only criticize standards, rules, procedures but also try to show what procedures aided scientists in their work. For example, I point out that and why it was reasonable for Einstein to use an unconfirmed and prima facie refuted theory containing internal contradictions in his account of Brownian motion. And I explain why and how the use of a puzzling instrument such as the telescope that was theoretically opaque and showed many unreal phenomena could still contribute to progress. My argument in both cases is cosmological: given certain properties of the world, of our instruments (theoretical instruments such as standards included) some procedures are bound to fail while others have a chance of succeeding, i.e. of leading to the discovery of details of a world so constituted. For example, I point out that the fluctuations that limit the validity of the strict second law of thermodynamics cannot be identified directly because they occur in all our measuring instruments. Thus I don’t take the excellence of science for granted (though I often assume it for the purpose of argument), I try to show wherein it consists and how greatly it differs from the naive standards of excellence proposed by rationalists.

With this I come to a problem that was never explicitly discussed in AM though it underlies all its arguments – the problem of the relation between reason and practice. In AM I try to show that reason, at least in the form in which it is defended by logicians, philosophers of science and some scientists does not fit science and could not have contributed to its growth. This is a good argument against those who admire science and are also slaves of reason. They have now to make a choice. They can keep science; they can keep reason; they cannot keep both.

But science is not sacrosanct. The mere fact that it exists, is admired, has results is not sufficient for making it a measure of excellence. Modern science arose from global objections against what went on before and rationalism itself, the idea that there are general rules and standards for conducting our affairs, affairs of knowledge included, arose from global objections to commonsense (example: Xenophanes against Homer). Are we to refrain from engaging in those activities that gave rise to science and rationalism in the first place? Are we to rest content with their results? Are we to assume that everything that happened after Newton (or after von Neumann) is perfection? Or shall we admit that modern science may have basic faults and may be in need of global change? And, having made the admission, how shall we proceed? How shall we localize faults and carry out changes? Don’t we need a measure that is independent of science and conflicts with it in order to prepare the change we want to bring about? And will not the rejection of rules and standards that conflict with science forever prevent us from finding such a measure? On the other hand – have not some of the case studies shown that a blunt application of ‘rational’ procedures would not have given us a better science, or a better world but nothing at all? And how are we to judge the results themselves? Obviously there is no simple way of guiding a practice by rules or of criticizing standards of rationality by a practice.

2.Reason and Practice

The problems I have just sketched are old ones and much more general than the problem of the relation between science and rationality. They occur whenever a rich, well-articulated and familiar practice – a practice of composing, of painting pictures, of stage production, of selecting people for public office, of keeping order and punishing criminals, a practice of worship, of organizing society – is confronted by a practice of a different kind that can interact with it. The interactions and their results depend on historical conditions and vary from one case to the next. A powerful tribe invading a country may impose its laws and change the indigenous traditions by force only to be changed itself by the remnants of the subdued culture. A ruler may decide, for reasons of convenience, to use a popular and stabilizing religion as the basic ideology of his empire and may thereby contribute to the transformation both of his empire and of the religion chosen. An individual, repelled by the theatre of his time and in search of something better may study foreign plays, ancient and modern theories of drama and, using the actors of a friendly company to put his ideas into practice, change the theatre of a whole nation. A group of painters, desirous of adding the reputation of being scientists to their already enormous reputation as skilled craftsmen may introduce scientific ingredients such as geometry into painting and thereby create a new style and new problems for painters, sculptors, architects. An astronomer, critical of the difference between classical principles of astronomy and the existing practice and desirous to restore astronomy to its former splendour may find a way to achieve his aim and so initiate the removal of the classical principles themselves.

In all these cases we have a practice, or a tradition, we have certain influences upon it, emerging from another practice or tradition and we observe a change. The change may lead to a slight modification of the original practice, it may eliminate it, it may result in a tradition that barely resembles either of the interacting elements.

Interactions such as those just described are accompanied by changing degrees of awareness on part of the participants. Copernicus knew very well what he wanted and so did Constantine the Great (I am now speaking about the initial impulse, not about the transformation that followed). The intrusion of geometry into painting is less easily accounted for in terms of awareness. We have no idea why Giotto tried to achieve a compromise between the surface of the painting and the corporeality of the things painted, especially as pictures were not yet regarded as studies of material reality. We can surmise that Brunelleschi arrived at his construction by a natural extension of the architects’ method of representing three-dimensional objects and that his contacts with contemporary scientists were not without consequence. It is still more difficult to understand the gradually rising claims of artisans to make contributions to the same knowledge whose principles were explained at universities in very different terms. Here we have not a critical study of alternative traditions as we have in Copernicus, or in Constantine but an impression of the uselessness of academic science when compared with the fascinating consequences of the journeys of Columbus, Magellan and their successors. There arose then the idea of an ‘America of Knowledge’, of an entirely new and as yet unforeseen continent of knowledge that could be discovered, just as the real America had been discovered: by a combination of skill and abstract study. Marxists have been fond of confounding insufficient information concerning the awareness that accompanies such processes with irrelevance and they have ascribed only a secondary role to individual consciousness. In this they were right – but not in the way they thought. For new ideas, though often necessary, were not sufficient for explaining the changes that now occurred and that depended also on the (often unknown and unrealized) circumstances under which the ideas were applied. Revolutions have transformed not only the practices their initiators wanted to change but the very principles by means of which they intended to carry out the change.

Now considering any interaction of traditions we may ask two kinds of questions which I shall call observer questions and participant questions respectively.

Observer questions are concerned with the details of an interaction. They want to give a historical account of the interaction and, perhaps, formulate laws, or rules of thumb, that apply to all interactions. Hegel’s triad: position, negation, synthesis (negation of the negation) is such a rule.

Participant questions deal with the attitude the members of a practice or a tradition are supposed to take towards the (possible) intrusion of another. The observer asks: what happens and what is going to happen? The participant asks: what shall I do? Shall I support the interaction? Shall I oppose it? Or shall I simply forget about it?

In the case of the Copernican Revolution, for example, the observer asks: what impact did Copernicus have on Wittenberg astronomers at about 1560? How did they react to his work? Did they change some of their beliefs and if so, why? Did their change of opinion have an effect on other astronomers, or were they an isolated group, not taken seriously by the rest of the profession?

The questions of a participant are: this is a strange book indeed – should I take it seriously? Should I study it in detail or only superficially or should I simply continue as before? The main theses seem absurd at first sight – but, maybe, there is something in them? How shall I find out? And so on.

It is clear that observer questions must take the questions of the participants into account and participants will also listen most carefully (if they are inclined that way, that is) to what observers have to say on the matter – but the intention is different in both cases. Observers want to know what is going on, participants what to do. An observer describes a life he does not lead (except accidentally), a participant wants to arrange his own life and asks himself what attitude to take towards the things that try to influence it.

Participants can be opportunists and act in a straightforward and practical way. In the late 16th century many princes became Protestants because this furthered their interests and some of their subjects became Protestants in order to be left in peace. When British Colonial Officials replaced the laws and habits of foreign tribes and cultures by their own ‘civilized’ laws the latter were often accepted because they were the laws of the King, or because one had no way to oppose them and not because of any intrinsic excellence. The source of their power and ‘validity’ was clearly understood, both by the officials and by the more astute of their unfortunate subjects. In the sciences and espec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Reason and Practice
• Part Two: Science in a Free Society
• Part Three: Conversations with Illiterates
• Notes
• Index